[OLPC-Games] Pygame

Kent Quirk kent_quirk at cognitoy.com
Sun May 13 13:39:57 EDT 2007


Bert Freudenberg wrote:
> On May 13, 2007, at 6:35 , Kent Quirk wrote:
>
>   
>> The full screen black and white resolution of the
>> XO is 1200x900, the color resolution is effectively lower
>>     
>
> I wish you would phrase this differently. It causes everyone to be  
> confused about this mysterious "color mode".
>
> The frame buffer resolution is fixed at 1200x900, period. Even in  
> color mode. This is all a software developer really needs to worry  
> about.
>
> And unless we find an efficient way to upscale in SDL then this is  
> also the resolution that games will have to run on.
>   

Ok, you're right. The display memory map is always 1200x900. Because of 
the way the color system works, though, you can't expect to draw a color 
to a single pixel and predict its appearance. What I tried to say was 
that the *effective* resolution of color is lower. Areas of color work 
great, but individual pixels don't behave the way you a naive programmer 
might expect.

I agree that the color display is misunderstood, but I also don't think 
we can pretend there's not an issue. Yes, code for 1200x900. But 
understand that if you draw in color, you'd probably do best to draw 
wide lines and fat pixels if you want the color to be accurate.

And actually, we may find that you should code for 1200x900, but games 
that are dependent on frame performance might want to have the play area 
of the game be smaller. I'd actually like to tweak PyGame so that if you 
ask for a smaller screen you get a centered window on the full screen, 
again so that off-the-shelf PyGame code has a hope of working well.

    Kent




-- 
------------------------------------------------------------
Kent Quirk           I'm making a game about global warming.
Game Architect                        Track the progress at:
CogniToy                http://www.cognitoy.com/meltingpoint



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